by Don Mayer
“Witch hunt!” We’ve heard that phrase from Donald Trump as a stock response to any number of investigations, indictments, and impeachments. The Mueller investigation, both impeachment proceedings, the Georgia investigation (of a “perfect” phone call to the Georgia Secretary of State), and the “hoax” that was the E. Jean Carroll civil proceeding against Trump for assault and defamation.
Now, George Santos is using that familiar phrase to attack an indictment for several kinds of crimes. From the New York Times article on May 10, 2023:
- Mr. Santos was also charged with three counts of money laundering in connection to a donor solicitation scheme.
- Prosecutors charged the congressman with two more counts of wire fraud and one count of stealing public money in connection with what they said was another scheme to obtain unemployment benefits from New York beginning in June 2020. Mr. Santos was earning $120,000 a year through his employment at a Florida-based investment company, but prosecutors said he repeatedly told the state he had been unemployed since March 2020. He collected more than $24,000 in benefits.
- Prosecutors further charged Mr. Santos with two counts of making false statements to the House of Representatives on personal financial disclosure reports.
So, just what is a “witch hunt?” For U.S. folks, witch hunts were made famous in Salem, Massachusetts, when women were tried and executed for practicing “witchcraft.” But witch hunts far predate the Salem witch trials. From the Britannica:
“The events in Salem in 1692 were but one chapter in a long story of witch hunts that began in Europe between 1300 and 1330 and ended in the late 18th century (with the last known execution for witchcraft taking place in Switzerland in 1782). The Salem trials occurred late in the sequence, after the abatement of the European witch-hunt fervor, which peaked from the 1580s and ’90s to the 1630s and ’40s. Some three-fourths of those European witch hunts took place in western Germany, France, northern Italy, and Switzerland. The number of trials and executions varied according to time and place, but it is generally believed that some 110,000 persons in total were tried for witchcraft and between 40,000 to 60,000 were executed.”
https://www.britannica.com/event/Salem-witch-trials
The problem, of course, is that those women were not witches ––actual witches did not exist. Thus, the “hunt” for witches was a trumped up charge (pardon the pun) that had no basis in fact.
In effect, by invoking “witch hunt,” Santos is saying there is no basis in fact for these prosecutions.
But he’s lucky he lives in “America,” (the U.S., that is, not Central or South America), where women are no longer accused and tried for witchcraft. But, in India, the witch hunts persist.
“….witchcraft accusations are now often simply a tool to oppress women, victims’ advocates say. The motives can be to grab land, to ostracize a woman to settle a score, or to justify violence.”
“In the Jharkhand case, the young woman who was attacked, Durga Mahato, said the trouble started when she refused the sexual advances of a prominent man in the village. He, his brother, his wife and their daughter then declared Ms. Mahato a witch before luring her to their home and attacking her.”
Even though women around the world are still subject to witch hunts, U.S. politicians (always men, it seems) have flipped the script; now it is only men who are “victims” of “witch hunts.”
But it seriously wrong to compare accountability for wrongdoing to the “persecution, torturing, and executions of innocent men and women for crimes that they could not have committed in an enchanted world most of us no longer believe in. Their deaths were among the darkest historical moments in Western civilisation.”
As “the Conversation” (above) notes, “It borders on the ludicrous to hear the US President, touted as the most powerful man in the world, complain of being persecuted like a witch. The deaths of those convicted of witchcraft should not be demeaned and belittled by irresponsible, inaccurate, and plainly ignorant statements.”
As of January 2020, Trump had tweeted the words “Witch Hunt” (always with or in capitals) 337 times, or roughly once every three days in his presidency.
Why anyone believes that either Trump or Santos tells the truth in claiming that pernicious public officials are out to get them is far from clear. Trump still gets applause and shouts of approval from his fans when he calls E. Jean Carroll a “wack job” and claims he never met her.
As they say, “It’s a free country.” Guilty people are free to claim “witch hunt,” and it’s perfectly legal to applaud them for their lies. Perfectly legal, in fact. But wrong.